Immigration mess caused by law of unintended consequences: Tim Rutten

The crises currently rolling through America’s dysfunctional immigration system make the case for comprehensive reform about as forcefully as any set of circumstances could.

The argument being proffered, however, does not assign blame along the lines commonly heard in the bitter debate over this question: Neither the intransigence of an implacably ideological Republican majority in the House, which the Democrats rightly cite, nor the negligence or conspiratorial aims of the Obama administration, as the GOP partisans allege, is at fault.

At the moment, we are not suffering from a fault of omission, but from the law of unintended consequences.

The stunning influx of unaccompanied children across the southern border has nothing to do with the administration’s inattention or purported fecklessness. Rather, it was set in motion six years ago by a piecemeal attempt to attach a patch to the immigration code. In December 2008, the Senate and House almost unanimously passed and then-President George W. Bush quickly signed the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, a measure named for the 19th century English parliamentarian who was a leading opponent of the African slave trade. (The only “no” votes came from two GOP congressmen, who opposed it on financial grounds.) Modeled after successful European statutes, it was designed to combat a sudden upsurge in the international trafficking of children for sexual abuse. Its backers included not only the entire Senate, nearly all of the House and the then-Republican White House, but also a coalition of evangelical Christian organizations and social conservatives. The aim was to afford additional due process guarantees to children trafficked across the border, so that they wouldn’t be routinely deported back into the hands of their predatory exploiters after apprehension by authorities here.

It took a number of years for knowledge of the new procedures to circulate widely outside the United States, particularly in Central America, where desperate local conditions fueled word-of-mouth, often misinformed, discussions. Since last Oct, 1, according to federal officials, more than 57,000 unaccompanied children have been taken into custody along the U.S.-Mexican border, which already is double the number in all of last year. More than 80 percent of them are from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. Only a fraction of the young migrants are from the latter country, and nearly all of them are from the Mayan-speaking highlands, where the wheel of chronic want is grinding with particular force this year. The huge numbers of children from El Salvador and Honduras are fleeing here for other reasons — and those, too, involve America and unintended consequences.

Both those Central American nations are in the grip of what is almost surely the world’s worst street gang crisis. Honduras, according to UN statistics, now has the world’s highest murder rate, while El Salvador has the fourth and Guatemala the fifth. Two of the Earth’s deadliest cities now are in Honduras. Regionally, Central America has surpassed war-torn sub-Saharan Africa as the globe’s homicide capital. A legacy of protracted civil war has something to do with that in Guatemala and El Salvador, but the main villains are two street gangs — the Mara Salvatrucha or MS-18 and 18th Street gangs, both of which were born right here in Los Angeles and exported to Central America.

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In the 1980s, when large numbers of Central American migrants began coming to Los Angeles, the city was itself in the midst of a street gang crisis fueled in large part by struggles over the drug trade. With indigenous gangs operating in nearly every minority neighborhood, the newly arrived Central American young people set up their own groups, initially as a form of protection, though they soon branched into all the usual varieties of criminality — from protection to narcotics. Mara Salvatrucha was born in the Pico Union and 18th Street near the intersection of that street and Union in the Rampart district. Soon, criminal members of both gangs who were here without papers were being deported back to their Central American nations, where their new groups took root and flourished with a virulence that was tragically predictable in nations that were then a veritable petri dish for social pathologies.

MS-18 and 18th Street now are so remorselessly violent that the Sinaloa and Zetas Mexican drug cartels have hired them as mercenaries in their drug wars. Today, poor parents across Central America are so desperate to put their children beyond the reach of what is essentially a made-in-America plague that they’re willing to send them alone on the long and dangerous trek to the Rio Grande. Was the U.S. right to deport undocumented criminals back in the 1980s? Of course it was. The unintended consequence was the spread of a previously unknown violent street culture, and the further consequence of that spread is today’s influx of child immigrants. Imagine the utter desperation of parents who felt their only choice was to set their children alone on a journey usually undertaken by only the most resolute adults.

The tens of thousands of children suddenly in our midst are hardly the only crisis created by a piecemeal approach to immigration reform. As the Associated Press reported last week, workers at the iconic Harley-Davidson Wisconsin plant have filed a federal lawsuit alleging that the global staffing firm — India-based Infosys Ltd. — now running the motorcycle maker’s tech support is discriminating against skilled American workers by replacing them with lower-paid South East Asian employees admitted under the H-1B temporary visa program for skilled workers.

The problem clearly extends beyond motorcycles. Last year, Infosys agreed to pay a record $34 million to settle federal charges that it was bringing in workers on short-term executive visas, rather than applying for them under the H-1B quota. About the same time, IBM was forced to pay $44,000 to settle the Justice Department’s allegations that its job postings expressed a preference for foreign workers.

American industry’s ability to tap the world’s top talent — particularly in high-tech and scientific research — is a vital key to our global competitiveness. Firms from Facebook to Microsoft have been lobbying hard in recent months for inclusion of an expanded H-1B program, because they argue there isn’t enough trained U.S. talent to meet their needs. That may be true, but there’s increasing evidence that staffing companies are gaming the system to pump up their margins by displacing qualified American workers — thus contributing to both our unemployment woes and the income disparity crisis.

Currently, 85,000 H-1B visas, good for a six-year stay, are issued each year and there are about 600,000 holders of the permit employed here at any given time. The latest immigration reform measure passed by the Senate and stalled in the House would increase the number of H-1B visas granted annually to 180,000. As AP reported, though, “amid calls for expanding the nation’s so-called H-1B visa program, there is growing pushback from Americans who argue the program has been hijacked by staffing companies that import cheaper, lower-level workers to replace more expensive U.S. employees — or keep them from getting hired in the first place.”

“It’s getting pretty frustrating when you can’t compete on salary for a skilled job,” said Rich Hajinlian, a veteran computer programmer from the Boston area. “You hear references all the time that these big companies ... can’t find skilled workers. I am a skilled worker.” The 56-year-old Hajinlian said “he applied for a job in April through a headhunter and that the potential client appeared interested, scheduling a longer interview. Then, said Hajinlian, the headhunter called back and said the client had gone with an H-1B worker whose annual salary was about $10,000 less.”